Takoyaki party

9/24/2010
This morning I had a lot to do after waking up. I am spending the whole weekend at Candace's house, so I had to pack 3 days' worth of clothes. Also, I had a history quiz/test today that I hadn't quite finished studying for... So I had a lot of baggage today. My normal, gigantic backpack, my purse, and another bag with my clothes and stuff... It wasn't easy to ride my bike with everything... Anyway, I finished studying on the train :)
Oh yeah! and when my host dad was driving me to the station, I was trying to tell him that I video chatted with some friends last night, and I used "yuube" which means last night, and he laughed at me. Apparently "yuube" is only used by old people, and my host parents, who are in their sixties, are still too young to use it.... I was embarrassed... My host dad asked me who taught it to me, and I told him it was my Japanese teacher last year, so he was like "is he old?" hahahaha.
Anyway The history quiz/test was really easy, and I finished it really fast. After history was English, and since we already finished kokoro with an ODE (opportunity to display excellence, aka a test), we started A Streetcar Named Desire... My teacher also told us that everyone who hadn't talked to him about their essays yet could come talk to him today. So right after class, (since I have a free period next) I asked him if we could talk about my essay. He told me to wait for like 10 minutes, and then come see him in his office. I waited like 5 minutes, and went to talk to him, but he wasn't ready yet. He was like "I'll come get you when I'm ready, just wait." lolz, I'm so impatient. But he told us that the grades ranged from D's to B+'s. No one made an A :( so I was scared...
It turned out to be okay. I got an 89 on my paper, which I guess is the highest out of the range of grades everyone got, but it's still not an A, and I'm still disappointed... but I can still rewrite it, and make the grade better.
Next was math, nothing exciting there...
After that was Japanese, which was completely miserable today... We took a practice JLPT level 4 test, because they want people to take the JLPT, and this was supposed to help them determine what levels people should take. (btw JLPT=Japanese Language Proficiency test, and the levels are 1-5, 5 is the easiest, 1 is the hardest). For some reason like everyone in the class decided to give up, so people were throwing things, and talking, and I could not focus to save my life! and so everyone like circled random things and turned it in, and I was the only one working the whole way through. So the teacher kept asking everyone to be quiet (of course they weren't), but they were just waiting for me to finish, it was freaking impossible to focus.... Kiara was super nice though, she kept asking people to shut up so I could focus... But yeah, it was miserable.
So after school I went to Marius' volleyball practice. He plays volleyball with the Ichinomiya high school team. I went because Candace usually goes, and I went home with her today. Anyway, it was fun, and the guys were really nice. The captain, whose name is Mizuki, brought us some volleyballs, so we could play with them while they practiced. After practice, we went to a Takoyaki restaurant for dinner. I didn't eat much, because there like wasn't anything vegetarian. But on our way there (it was a long walk), I was talking with Mizuki, and he asked me if I liked takoyaki, I told him that I was a vegetarian, so i couldn't eat it, and so he asked me what all I can and can't eat. (Which isn't weird because people here ask me that all the time. Like even if we will never eat together, they are just really interested in what I can and can't eat. There aren't a lot of vegetarians here...) So in the restaurant, after it had been a while, and I hadn't eaten anything, mizuki came over to me from the other table with a menu, and asked me what I wanted. But I told him that I was fine. I was sitting at a table with Marius, Carter (Americans), and three Japanese guys. I only know one of the guys' names, I think his nickname is zushi, but Candace calls him sushi. So dinner was lots of fun. Marius used me as his translator....
After dinner, we walked home, I had my bike, but I was going with Candace and Marius who didn't have bikes, so we all walked. The volleyball guys parted with us, they were all on bike, so they just rode away. It was about 9:30 pm, and we weren't entirely sure where we were. The three of us tried to go back the way we came, but I think we turned at the wrong place at one point, and ended up pretty lost. We asked I think a total of about 5 people for help, but we got pointed in quite a few different directions... Marius parted with us when he figured out in what direction the station was, because the station is like 30 minutes on foot from candace's house, so we were looking for Ichinomiya high school. We finally asked this one guy for directions, I thought he looked sketchy, and I didn't want to ask him, but Candace did, and he was smoking, and I smelled some alcohol on him, but he was very nice, and very helpful. We asked him where the high school was, and he didn't know, so he asked us if we could look it up on our cell phones, but since we have cheap prepaid phones, we can't do that, so he got out his phone and looked it up for us. He kept saying that he had lots of time, so it was okay. But his phone didn't show a map, so it wasn't helpful, but then two guys were riding by on bikes, and they were wearing ichinomiya high school uniforms, so the guy asked them where the school was, and they pointed it out, so we found our way home! Yeah.... that was fun.... This was like the first time that I've gotten legitimately lost, but I'm just really glad that I wasn't alone! And we made it back okay. I'm just going to pay more attention now whenever I go anywhere!
Candace and I got Mizuki's email address (which in Japan can be used just for texting) and we stayed up texting him for a while. It took forever because he would say everything in both japanese and english, I would text him back in japanese, and candace would text him back in a mixture of both languages. Anyway, it was fun, and I got some practice texting in Japanese.